Congress Should Fix Flawed Davis-Bacon Wage System Before Expanding
According to our good friend James Sherk at The Heritage Foundation, the Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wage determination survey system is deeply flawed. Here at the Alliance for Worker Freedom, we could not agree more. While we continue to maintain that complete repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act should be the end goal, James highlights several "fixes" for the current system. It is our hope that Congress, if without the resolve to completely repeal the Act, can adopt these principles which will allow for a truer calculation of actual "market" wages - and not paying union determined, over-inflated wages.
We thank James and our friends at The Heritage Foundation for all their hard work on this issue and fully support their efforts in this field. A brief introduction of the report follows, with a link to view the full document.
Eight sections of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA, H.R. 6) would greatly extend the reach of the Davis-Bacon Act. Under Davis-Bacon, Congress requires federal construction contractors to pay "prevailing" wages to prevent the government's buying power from forcing down wages of construction workers, but most of these sections do not concern federal construction projects. Additionally, Davis-Bacon wages bear little relation to the wage rates that prevail in the marketplace. Specifically, Davis-Bacon wage determinations are not made on the basis of scientifically valid random samples, and investigators have uncovered errors in 100 percent of the wage reports they reviewed. Further, the Department of Labor takes several years to process and publish wage determinations. Rather than expand its coverage, Congress should amend the Davis-Bacon Act to require prompt wage determinations to be made using proper statistical techniques...click to continue.
